Facebook Email Search Could Leak Millions of Users' Details, But the Company Ignored it: Report

Facebook appears to have yet another security vulnerability to deal with, one which they apparently ignored and did not deem important enough to begin with. Furthermore, the Facebook Email Search v1.0 tool could apparently churn out searches of up to 5 million user accounts each day – hence suggesting the presence of such bulk data mining tools that exploit Facebook vulnerabilities regularly. ‘Not important enough’ Alongside the numbers and the volume of users that could be potentially affected, Facebook Email Search v1.0 also brought out the side of Facebook that the company has really been trying to convince people is not true. According to the researcher that spoke to Ars for this report, upon disclosing his findings to Facebook through their bug bounty programme, a company representative seemingly informed him that the vulnerability shown in the Facebook Email Search v1.0 exploit technique was “not important enough” to be patched, and therefore, no action would be taken about it. Reluctance against privacy In correspondence with Dan Goodin of Ars, a Facebook spokesperson claims that their company closed this vulnerability’s bug bounty report “erroneously, before routing to the appropriate team.” The spokesperson has further confirmed that the company is taking “initial actions” to fix what’s been reported, and claimed that Facebook engineers had previously disabled the data mining technique that has been reported here, and therefore believed that the flaw has been covered.